Home Server Blog Forums are Online!

Our ESXi forums and home server forum is now open for posting and community. Join us for discussions, questions, tutorials, and more on ESXi home labs, home servers, general IT, and more. The forum is a stand-alone installation, and does not require registration on the blog, but requires individual registration on the forums themselves. To register, visit the Home Server Blog Forum and create an account. You can also reach the forum through the link on the top level menu.

As the blog has grown more popular, and more and more people have been asking questions that require longer answers in the comments, I’ve been considering adding a forum to the site. Adding one to WordPress itself seemed to work, but with the large amount of Spam targeting the site, there were tons of fraudulent signups, and tightening the security did nothing but make it to where people couldn’t log in.

Therefore, I’ve installed Simple Machines Forum at forums.thehomeserverblog.com, and opened up the forums for any questions, comments, ESXi tutorials, or general information that you may want to share, or ask questions.

This should resolve itself today. We were doing some DNS edits on the nameservers on Friday, and somehow, the A record for the forums got deleted. On top of that, I’ve been sick with food poisoning this weekend, so it went a couple of days without being fixed/noticed. If you want to reach it sooner, you can edit your hosts file and set the IP to 172.245.13.98 and you can go right to it.

My apologies about the forums. Although I do run my own cloud hosting company, I host the forums on another company’s servers (HudsonValleyHost.com) just to have peace of mind that someone else is taking care of them and to support a local business. Unfortunately, I checked today and the load on their server where the forums are hosted was 60! That would be a problem.
Obviously, they aren’t taking care of the site like I intended. I’ll move the forums back to my own servers late tonight so the impact of them being down won’t be as much. Everything should be back to normal once more. Again, my apologies.

Mike Rechtien

Have you had the chance to move the forums? I’m still getting the same error (via two different ISP’s / PC’s)…

Mike, yes, I moved it the day I posted this. It’s resolving to the correct IP and I can hit it, but I also notice that if I run it through a page load checker, some portions of the US are unable to load the page. It’s been too long for propagation, so I’ll investigate tonight when I get home and see what got snarled up. Sorry about that.

Looks like there was a partial misconfiguration in my DNS cluster with one our of five of the nodes reporting the wrong IP. I’ve corrected this and propagation shouldn’t take more than a few hours. If it’s taking too long, you can always put an entry in your hosts file for the correct IP. The line would look like:
198.252.100.56 forums.thehomeserverblog.com

Don Fountain

The HomeServerBlog.com is information about using real datacenter technologies in your home, configured in an easy to maintain, efficient, and most of all, cost effective manner. We focus on helping you with a lab that is multiuse, allowing for experimentation with virtualization and other technologies, home storage, home backup, and more.
Note that my posts are my opinion, and not any official view or stance of my employer. About Me